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Artwork is confrontation, asserts Rick Rubin in The Artistic Act: A Manner of Being. “Fictional worlds aren’t simply figments of an individual’s creativeness; they flow into and exist independently of us and might be referred to as up, accessed and explored when wanted,” write Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby in Speculative All the pieces. Dionne Model, in A Map to the Door of No Return: On Belonging, confirms that “To seek out our method efficiently, it’s not sufficient to have a map. We’d like a cognitive schema in addition to a sensible mastery of way-finding.”
Vejigantes—figures in Puerto Rican festivals—are frequent protagonists in multidisciplinary artist Beatriz Amelia Whitehill’s work. Initially, making appearances in Chisme as a cut-out and painted canvas on high of the canvas surrounding the individuals seated round a desk sharing tales, and in Shadows That Converse With Us, lurking within the background and painted on the canvas immediately. This work depicts an nameless determine pointing a gun whereas vignettes make themselves identified within the shadow self of the determine: conquistadors sporting morion helmets in an attacking place and luxurious fields blazing. Initially, I assumed these deviant creatures with horned fangs have been framing units in Whitehill’s work, however her latest items point out they’re greater than that.
Most lately, Whitehill resurrects vejigantes by way of papier-mâché. What’s so thrilling about this second in her apply is her experimentation in sculpture; she’s identified for her work. This well timed discourse aligns with Puerto Rico’s standing reappearing within the information due to efforts to silence the coquis’ notable hum, Dangerous Bunny’s declaration, “Seguimo aquí / we’re nonetheless right here” within the music video for DTMF (2025), stuffed with nostalgia of pre-gentrification, and wider-spread acknowledgement of fixing landscapes and the underbelly of American imperialism and the way pure disasters and the COVID-19 pandemic particularly uncovered these fault traces for the island.
By Whitehill’s papier-mâché vejigantes, she deconstructs and reconstructs mid-Twentieth-century maps of Puerto Rico with sketches of vejigantes and unknown figures and painted flames on the horns, demonstrating an embodied colonial, imperial and folkloric cartographic palimpsest. These fragmentary varieties recommend that maps are psychological and never fastened, which is in rigidity with mapping indigeneity and Blackness. What’s compelling about this collage is that it’s shaped round a clay mould within the form of a vejigante. By taking over the type of this beloved and terrifying creature, these maps turn into a fiction shrouded in layers of (lowercase ‘t’) fact. Maps have been a political instrument of domination that warps scale and slaps on Spanish names with white supremacist capitalist patriarchy because the ideological adhesive.
Traditionally, papier-mâché as a folks materials is fragile, ephemeral and a signifier of DIY tradition. When referring to papier-mâché, the Journal of Rising Applied sciences and Revolutionary Analysis calls the transformation a “(re)start” and provides a proverbial description: “Initially unwritten, we’re formed by the environment over time.” In Whitehill’s palms, the medium transforms from a instrument of domination to one in every of defiance and ancestral reminiscence. Whereas she is primarily often called a painter, the usage of papier-mâché might be learn as a departure from “industrial” or “institutional supplies” and a shift in the direction of the vernacular, blurring the road between art work, on a regular basis family object, artifact and efficiency. Moreover, the hand-held scale has a conceptual presence of a monument, however as a substitute of a extra everlasting materials, it symbolizes an adaptive or residing archive. To name this work an intervention would sanitize its radicality. It’s a confrontation of histories, who’s telling what tales and the load of reality and folklore.
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